Social media isn’t remarkable in its use as a tool that allows people a voice for social change. The history of communication innovation is also a history of new ways for ideas to spread. Just look at the centuries-long turmoil sparked by the invention of the printing press: Reformation, Enlightenment, and revolutions spread through illicit broadsides.
Social media IS remarkable in its speed and spread – how quickly it can transmit voices for social change and how far. As a medium, it is unprecedented in both speed (near-instantaneous) and spread (world-wide.)
As a result, perhaps unsurprisingly, social media has developed a reputation for supporting civic engagement and activism.
Commentators have pointed to real social change coming about because of social media, such as the uprisings of the Arab Spring, the Black Lives Matter movement, and #metoo.
Other, more skeptical commentators have fretted over whether the bandwagon effect of social media criticism ever translates out of online “slacktivist” echo chambers into real, measurable change.
Given how easy it is to retweet a post you agree with and call it a day, this skepticism is understandable. Are the majority of voices for social change on social media actually effecting any change in the real world?
I share this conflicted attitude toward activism via social media (“So many possibilities for communication and change! But is it all just a lot of hot air?”) So, to get a better pulse on what might actually be taking place, I decided to turn to the researchers.
As you might expect, using social media for political protest is a flourishing area of research, attracting researchers from backgrounds ranging from statistical analysis to social science and psychology, and drawing on both qualitative and quantitative analysis methods in their effort to understand what social media for political protest looks like as well as its magnitude.
Skimming the research, one thing becomes clear: the majority of people conducting research on this topic agree that social media has a notable impact on some social movements and their related protests.
The successful use of social media fall into one of two categories:
- Social media is used to try to change the conversation about an issue.
- Social media is used to go a step further and try to address not just the perceptions of an issue but the issue itself.
Researchers have found that social media is an important element in:
- Sharing information (e.g. disseminating video recordings of police brutality against unarmed black men, or documenting what happens when a trans person is outed to their coworkers.)
- Building context and frameworks through which to approach problematic issues (e.g. spreading understanding of sexual consent and its violations during #metoo in a manner that clarified to many women that their past experiences were neither isolated nor to be shrugged off as “boys will be boys”.)
- Assisting in the organization and facilitation of offline, real-world protests (e.g. the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the Tahrir Square protests, and the 2017 Women’s March.)
- Transferring commentary about issues from interest groups to the “elites” who possess the power to affect real change (e.g. the Black Lives Matter movement, which succeeded in drawing more popular news coverage, which in turn seems to have succeeded in drawing in elite advocates – a process impressively argued via statistical analysis by Freelon, McIlwain, and Clark.)
Ultimately, I think we can safely conclude from the literature that there is value in the argument that social media has true power in the realm of political protest and social change. The question is to what extent (remember: the online world does not operate in a vacuum, and for every activist group there is likely to be an active counter-activist group posting media to discredit and undermine the first.)
Further Reading
Bastos, MT, and Mercea, D. (2015). Serial activists: Political Twitter beyond influentials and the twittertariate. New Media & Society, 18(10): 2359-2378.
Bennett, W.L., and Segerberg, A. (2012). The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Information, Communication, & Society, 15(5): 739-768.
De Choudhury, M., Jhaver, S., Sugar, B., et al. (2016). Social media participation in an activist movement for racial equality. In: Proceedings of the Tenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, Cologne, 17-20 May 2016. Available at http://www.munmund.net/pubs/BLM_ICWSM16.pdf
Earl, J., and Kimport, K. (2011). Digitally Enabled Social change: Activism in the Internet Age. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Freelon, D., McIlwain, C., and Clark, M. (2018). Quantifying the power and consequences of social media protest. New Media & Society, 20(3): 990-1011.
Gonzalez-Balion, S., Borge-Holthoefer, J., and Moreno, Y. (2013). Broadcasters and hidden influentials in online protest diffusion. American Behavioral Scientist, 57(7): 934-965.
Shirky, C. (2011). The political power of social media: Technology, the public sphere, and political change. Foreign Affairs, 90: 28.
Theocharis, Y. (2013). The wealth of (occupation) networks? Communication patterns and information distribution in a Twitter protest network. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 10(1): 35-56.
Tufekci, Z., and Wilson, C. (2012). Social media and the decision to participate in political protest: observations from Tahrir Square. Journal of Communication, 62(2): 363-379.
Valenzuela, S., Arriagada, A., and Scherman, A. (2014). Facebook, Twitter, and youth engagement: A quasi-experimental study of social media use and protest behavior using propensity score matching. International Journal of Communication, 8: 25.